Really... never understood it. I get the idea of working 'cheap' to gain experience, and I understand volunteering. I also have offered to work at some places for a short time (week or so) to get a feel for the place. But I've never understood applying to ask to be considered to be approved to then go spend months of my life working for a company which is in the business of making a profit. I guess I never travelled in those sorts of circles where unpaid internships led to high-paying positions of immense money and power, which is why so many people would be lining up to do them.

If anyone would care to engage in some unpaid internships for me, let me know.

From the Digg blog - http://about.digg.com/node/564

"And if that doesn't sound like a big enough challenge, we're replacing most of our infrastructure components and moving away from LAMP."

Cassandra Linux Apache PHP?

PDO has been around for years, and offers standardized escaping and binding for all the major db platforms. If you're stuck with an "old PHP ways" host, they probably are still using PHP4 and have register_globals set to on - IOW, time to move to a modern host. Just like you wouldn't stick with a Java host only offering 1.3 or 1.4, it's time to vote with your wallet and move to modern hosting operations.

Wish I had mod points to give you for that one :)

Then perhaps you're very fortunate. While not common, I have seen them often enough to know what the grandparent was referring to. Typically I see them with issues around networking. If there's a DNS issue or wireless networking issue, you will almost inevitably see a message about "ask your system administrator xxxxx".

In my previous post, I'd meant to say "grandparent", rather than parent (your post). Still, given my position, I'm always happy to hear about Grails adoption successes. :)

Rails popularized a lot of ideas that have since been adopted/adapted by many other frameworks, including Grails. I'm not sure many people could argue that "convention over configuration" has overall been a *bad* thing for web development, especially in the Java world.

I think the parent possibly could have used JRuby for Rails, getting to stay on the JVM platform they were already comfortable with. But perhaps when they considered it JRuby wasn't as mature as they needed it to be.

Even for someone without a lot of Java experience, Grails can be very productive. I prefer the 'domain first' approach Grails allows, rather than the 'database first' which Rails promotes. There's no 'right' answer, but I prefer the Grails way. I've had my fair share of headaches with Grails over the last couple of years, but I'm typically more productive with it than other platforms on many/most types of projects.

I've got some high hopes for Rails 3, from what I've heard from my Ruby-lovin' friends. There's apparently been a lot of refactoring at various levels, so speed and resource handling should be much improved. I'm expecting some backwards compatibility breakage, but I've nothing to base that on other than speculation - major version numbers are the best time to do those sorts of changes, if any are required.

From that article:

PHP is an example of a scripted language. The computer or browser reads the program like a script, from top to bottom, and executes it in that order: anything you declare at the bottom cannot be referenced at the top.

This was true in PHP3, but since PHP4, even declaring functions at the bottom of a file, they were still available at the start of a file execution. Everything got compiled in to an intermediate stage before execution.

84/100 *IS* a fraction!

They're a meta character, and the meaning can be changed later.

* If I'm hitting the tab key and it's inserting X spaces, and I hit the key once too many times, I have to hit delete X times instead of just once.

* If the code is reused in a new environment where everyone wants their indentation levels at 4 spaces instead of 2 or 3 or 8, you have to reformat a lot of code manually. If tabs are used, remap the sizing of the tab character and you're done.

* The tab character itself has some semantic meaning - indent. The space is a word and symbol separator. Use an indentation character when you want to indicate indentation.

I'm finding that I'm buying slightly more kindle books than paper books these days (not a huge number, but still more), and part of that is due to price. Many new titles on Kindle are $9.99 - I can spend a bit more and get a paper version which I'll enjoy more, or can send to the library or a friend or whatever. I'm finding some kindle books that are only a few bucks ($3-$5) which strike my fancy, and I buy them for that price. Easier than heading to the store, often to pay *more* than the $5ish ebook cost. For me, $4.99 and under is a good price point for most ebooks, as it takes away most considerations for determining if something is "worth it" or not.

We at http://groovymag.com/ are trying to help with the recognition bit, although it does at times feel a bit like an uphill battle ;)